Your job or your sanity? How to not lose both (w/ Guy Winch) | from How to Be a Better Human

Modupe Akinola (0:06)

Hi, everyone, it's Modupe Akinola here.

Today, we're sharing an episode of a podcast we think you'll love. It's been handpicked by the TED staff, and we think that as TED Business listeners, you'll come away with a fresh idea and a totally new perspective. Enjoy, and head to the link in the description for more.

Chris Duffy (0:31)

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy.

Today's guest is psychologist, Guy Winch, and Guy was actually the very first guest we ever had on this podcast, way back on our very first episode, more than six years ago. Guy is back today to talk about his new book, Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life. Now, I think we're all aware of how a terrible job can dominate our thoughts and keep us up at night. I once worked at a place where the boss threw a plastic trash can at the wall, and in the middle of a meeting would loudly shush people who he didn't like, like, shh, shh, shh, stop talking. Now, that was not a fun job. I was very stressed and I spent a lot of time worrying while I was working there. But what Guy points out is that our lives can get taken over by work, even when the jobs are good, even when we like what we're doing and we respect the people who we're working with. In other words, figuring out how to reclaim your life from being just about work, that is something that applies to all of us.

In today's episode, we are going to get a lot deeper than just saying, you should have a work-life balance. Okay, great. What does that really mean? We're going to figure out what is going on in our psyches, what we have control over, and how we can reclaim our mental space and energy. To get us started, here is a clip from Guy's TED Talk, where he's explaining how obsessing over work played out in his own life.

Guy Winch (1:52)

I wanted to be a psychologist since I was a teenager, and I spent years pursuing that one goal. I opened my private practice as soon as I was licensed. It was a risky move not getting a day job at a hospital or a clinic, but within one year, my practice was doing quite well, and I was making more money than I ever made before. So why wasn't I happy? Why did I feel so burnt out?

For a few terrible weeks, I questioned whether I'd made a mistake. What if I had chosen the wrong profession? What if I had spent my entire life pursuing the wrong career?

But then I realized, no, I still loved psychology. The problem wasn't the work I did in my office. It was the hours I spent ruminating about work when I was home. I closed the door to my office every night, but the door in my head remained wide open and the stress just flooded in. I decided to keep a journal for a week and document exactly how much time I spent ruminating, and I was horrified by the results. It was over 30 minutes a night when I was trying to fall asleep. My entire commute to and from my office, that was 45 minutes a day, totally checked out for 20 minutes during a dinner party at the colleague's house. Never got invited there again.

And 90 minutes during a friend's talent show, that coincidentally was 90 minutes long.

In total, that week, it was almost 14 hours. That's how much downtime I was losing to something that actually increased my stress. That's what made me realize that I still loved my work. But ruminating was destroying that love. And it was destroying my personal life too.

Chris Duffy (3:50)

How do we get those hours of our lives back? How do we find that love again? How do we reclaim our personal life? We are going to find out right after this short break. I know I really teased you there. But it is quite literally my job to introduce these podcast ads. So I promise you, we will be right back with those answers in just a moment.

We are talking with Guy Winch about how to stop work from taking over our lives.

Guy Winch (4:25)

Hi, I'm Guy Winch. I'm a psychologist and I'm the author of Mind Over Grind, How to Break Free When Work Hijacks Your Life.

Chris Duffy (4:32)

So Guy, in this book, Mind Over Grind, have a lot of really compelling and for me surprising statistics. But they also line up with what I think a lot of us are experiencing in our day to day experience of work. For example, you talk about how 43% of workers have high stress and 67% are reporting symptoms of burnout. Burnout being when unmanaged job stress leads to mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion and shutting down. So for me, one of the things that really strikes me about that statistic is 67%, that's the majority of people. That means that experiencing burnout is the norm. And as a clinician, you see that in your practice as well.